The approaches described in this section are approaches that are known to the inventors and could be pursued. They are not necessarily approaches that have been pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section, or that those approaches are known to a person of ordinary skill in the art.
Many computer systems and applications make use of job schedulers to schedule future work.
Issue tracking systems are one example of such systems. Issue tracking systems (variously referred to as trouble ticket systems, support ticket systems, request management systems, and incident ticket systems) manage the creation and tracking of issues in a variety of contexts.
As one example, an issue tracking system may be deployed for use by a helpdesk. A busy helpdesk may manage thousands, tens of thousands, or even more issues. Each issue may have a different priority, require different actions, be handled by different people, and/or be handled by multiple different people over its lifecycle. Furthermore, the helpdesk may be trying (or obliged) to meet certain service level agreements (SLAs) applicable to the issues being handled.
In order to assist in managing issues an issue tracking system may identify tasks that need to be performed in the future and schedule those tasks by passing them to an underlying job scheduler to handle. Where large numbers of issues are being handled, however, the number of tasks that are generated and passed to the job scheduler can exceed the working capacity of the underlying job scheduler.